~ The life of Katharine Susannah Prichard, the art of biography, and other things

Recaps: constructing pasts from memory

I’ve been caught up in the US version of House of Cards. You can choose to watch each episode with or without ‘recaps’. I choose with. The recaps shift entirely each episode, highlighting a different thread of the long and involved narrative. You suddenly remember one of the minor characters and the brewing subplot which hasn’t been touched for an episode or two. The recap is determined by the episode you’re in. And the thing is that memory is like that too. Whenever I make a change in life and find myself in a different context, I make a new narrative, dredging up memories which were dormant in the previous episode but now make sense. An example: I moved to an Anglican church last year for the first time in my life. Suddenly I’m seeing new foreshadowings, a book I read at eighteen which nearly convinced me, the times I visited the cathedral with my grandfather the rector. Connections to other Anglicans. I’m finding in the mass of memory a subplot which made this inevitable. The difference is that in House of Cards, in almost any fictional narrative, there are no dead-ends, there are no superfluous events or characters.